This article provides fundamental tips that aerospace businesses must learn to implement their international quality management standard. The AS9100, which was particularly developed for aerospace manufacturing.
Organizations that are in aerospace manufacturing or provide services related to aerospace should seek to obtain the AS9100 certification for several reasons. It is an internationally acclaimed certification for aerospace quality management system. Achieving this certification will demonstrate that your business follows current regulations, your products are safe, quality-assured, and intended to fulfill the requirements of the customers. The standard is extremely essential for businesses to remain current in the industry. With this certification, they can prove their competence to supply products or parts to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), aviation, space, and defense organizations. This helps them to maintain their contracts or partnerships and become part of the overall global aerospace supply chain.
To get the AS9100 certified, aerospace organizations need to implement a practical and well-structured Quality Management System (QMS) by adhering to the standard requirements. While many get stuck in the procedure of the implementation, these simple steps will help them to smoothly get it done.
Simple Tips for Aerospace Organizations to Implement the QMS for AS9100 Certification
Make Everyone Ready and Committed
Large or monumental changes can happen in your organization if there is not proper and continual involvement by senior leadership team, along management, as well as employees from all departments. Besides, the implementation of a fully operational QMS which would integrate with all your current processes from start to finish but would take time and adequate resources. Therefore, the management team should take the initiative to arrange for the required resources, motivate employees at all levels to be thoroughly involved and require that each make themselves readily available for this implementation task. If necessary, you should organize training sessions to help the employees gain the necessary understanding of the QMS benefits and procure the skills to work with it.
Prepare a Plan
Advanced preparation and continual planning are the keys to a successful implementation project. In the case of the implementation of QMS in your aerospace organization, this fact stands true. Develop a solid plan and include the specifics of your QMS implementation project such as a checklist of steps, milestones, resources required, timeline required, departments and employees needed, monitoring/evaluation tasks, etc.
To make a clear and precise plan, you should perform a gap analysis of your current quality system. It will help to uncover all the shortcomings and issues in which are needing to be addressed in the QMS. Also, you can determine which requirements of the AS9100 are already met and which are not. Therefore, you will also discover the various irregularities and missing items. Accordingly, you can prepare a plan covering all the aspects i.e. weaknesses, problems and non-conformances that the new QMS should fix.
Design and Document the QMS
Based on the observations of the gap analysis, you will discover what changes are needed and what new processes are required in order to have a comprehensive QMS that is compliant with the AS9100 requirements. At first, you should document everything of the QMS i.e. put everything in writing, documenting the entire current changes, new procedures or practices that need to be introduced, essential work instructions, roles of the employees, and intended outcomes of each process.
After the documentation is complete, it is time to put everything into practice which is the start of the implementation project.
Operate the QMS for Some Time
Once the QMS is completely developed and changes are implemented according to the documentation, you should allow some time to see whether the system is operating effectively. You should observe the QMS operation for a maximum of 3 months to ensure are matured and is ready to be certified. In the interim time, conduct periodic internal audits as well as scheduled management reviews with the help of expert assessors. This will help in learning the areas in the QMS which are still not compliant or procedures that are executed inefficiently. Therefore, you have the time to address those issues with corrective measures and improve the compliance and efficiency of the QMS.
All these tips are in fact essential steps to make implementation of the QMS in your aerospace organization foolproof and result-oriented. It ensures that QMS implementation for the AS9100 certification is not the responsibility of a single person or team but that of the whole organization. Thus, ensuring there is proper communication between the management representatives and the employees. The employees will also fully understand the QMS and its documented procedures. Also, conduct reviews and audits frequently, initiate corrective actions and make your QMS ready for the final certification audit.
Damon Anderson is the managing partner at an accredited consultancy that provides a range of consultation and assurance services to businesses to help them achieve ISO management standards. He is a specialist in the AS9100 certification for the aerospace quality management system and likes to write about the certification tips, QMS implementation, etc.